25 August 2017

Rationality

There's been quite a lot of talk of "meta-rationality" lately amongst the blogs I read. It is ironic that this emerging trend comes at a time when the very idea of rationality is being challenged from beneath. Mercier and Sperber, for example, tell us that empirical evidence suggests that reasoning is "a form of intuitive [i.e., unconscious] inference" (2017: 90); and that reasoning about reasoning (meta-rationality) is mainly about rationalising such inferences and our actions based on them. If this is true, and traditional ways of thinking about reasoning are inaccurate, then we all have a period of readjustment ahead.

It seems that we don't understand rationality or reasoning. My own head is shaking as I write this. Can it be accurate? It is profoundly counter-intuitive. Sure, we all know that some people are less than fully rational. Just look at how nation states are run. Nevertheless, it comes as a shock to realise that I don't understand reasoning. After all, I write non-fiction. All of my hundreds of essays are the product of reasoning. Aren't they? well, maybe. In this essay, I'm going to continue my desultory discussion of reason by outlining a result from experimental psychology from the year I was born, 1966. In their recent book, The Enigma of Reason, Mercier & Sperber (2017) describe this experiment and some of the refinements since proposed.

But first a quick lesson in Aristotelian inferential logic. I know, right? You're turned off and about to click on something else. But please do bear with me. I'm introducing this because, unless you understand the logic involved in the problem, you won't get the full blast of the 50-year-old insight that follows. Please persevere and I think you'll agree at the end that it's worth it.


~Logic~

For our purposes, we need to consider a conditional syllogism. Schematically it takes the form:

If P, then Q.

Say we posit: if a town has a police station (P), then it also has a courthouse (Q). There are two possible states for each proposition. A town has a police station (P); it does not have a police station (not P or ¬P); it has a courthouse (Q); it does not have a court house (¬Q). What we concerned with here is what we can infer from each of these four possibilities, given the rule: If P, then Q.

The syllogism—If P, then Q—in this case tells us that it is always the case that if a town has a police station, then it also has a courthouse. If I now tell you that the town of Wallop in Hampshire, has a police station, you can infer from the rule that Wallop must also have a courthouse. This is a valid inference of the type that Aristotle called modus ponens. Schematically:

If P, then Q.
P, therefore Q. ✓

What if I tell you that Wallop does not have a police station? What can you infer from ¬P? You might be tempted to say that Wallop has no courthouse. But this would be a fallacy (called denial of the antecedent). It does not follow from the rule that if a town does not have a police station that it also doesn't have a court house. It is entirely possible under the given rule that a town has a courthouse but no police station.

If P, then Q.
¬P, therefore ¬Q. ✕

What if we have information about the courthouse and want to infer something about the police station. What can we infer if Wallop had a courthouse (Q)? Well, we've just seen that we cannot infer anything. Trying to infer something from the absence of the second part of the syllogism leads to false conclusions (affirmation of the consequent)


If P, then Q.
Q, therefore P. ✕

But we can make a valid inference if we know that Wallop has no courthouse (¬Q). If there is no courthouse and our rule is always true, then we can infer that there is no police station in Wallop. And this valid inference is the type called modus tollens by Aristotle.

If P, then Q.
¬Q, therefore ¬P. ✓

So, given the rule and information about one of the two propositions P and Q, we can make inferences about the other. But only in two cases can we make valid inferences, P and ¬Q.

rulegiveninferencevalidity
If P, then Q.PQ
¬P¬Q
QP
¬Q¬P


Of course, there are even less logical inferences one could make, but these are the ones that Aristotle deemed sensible enough to include in his work on logic. This is the logic that we need to understand. And the experimental task, proposed by Peter Wason in 1966, tested the ability of people to use this kind of reasoning.


~Wason Selection Task~

You are presented with four cards, each with a letter and number printed on either side.

The rule is: If a card has E on one side, it has 2 on the other.
The question is: which cards must be turned over to test the rule, i.e., to determine if the cards follow the rule. You have as much time as you wish.
~o~

Wason and his collaborators got a shock in 1966 because only 10% of their participants chose the right answer. Having prided ourselves on our rationality for millennia (in Europe, anyway) the expectation was that most people would find this exercise in reasoning relatively simple. Only 1 in 10 got the right answer. This startling result led Wason and subsequent investigators to pose many variations on this test, almost always with similar results.

Intrigued, they began to ask people about the level of confidence in their methods before getting their solution. Despite the fact that 90% would choose the wrong answer, 80% of participants were 100% sure they had the right answer! So it was not that the participants were hesitant or tentative. On the contrary, they were extremely confident in their method, whatever it was.

The people taking part were not stupid or uneducated. Most of them were psychology undergraduates. The result is slightly worse than one would expect from random guessing, which suggests that something was systematically going wrong.

The breakthrough came more than a decade later when, in 1979, Jonathan Evans came up with a variation in which the rule was: if a card has E on one side, it does not have 2 on the other. In this case, the proportions of right and wrong answers dramatically switched around, with 90% getting it right. Does this mean that we reason better negatively?
"This shows, Evans argued, that people's answers to the Wason task are based not on logical reasoning but on intuitions of relevance." (Mercier & Sperber 2017: 43. Emphasis added)
What Evans found was that people turn over the cards named in the rule. Which is not reasoning, but since it is predicated on an unconscious evaluation of the information, not quite a guess, either. Which is why the success rate is worse than random guessing.

Which cards did you turn over? As with the conditional syllogism, there are only two valid inferences to be made here: Turn over the E card. If it has a 2 on the other side, the rule is true for this card (but may not be true for others); if it does not have a 2, the rule is falsified. The other card to turn over is the one with a seven on it. If it has E on the other side, the rule is falsified; if it does not have an E, the rule may still be true.

Turning over the K tells us nothing relevant to the rule. Turning over the 2 is a little more complex, but ultimately futile. If we find an E on the other side of the 2 we may think it validates the rule. However, the rule does not forbid a card with 2 on one side having any letter, E or another one. So turning over the 2 does not give us any valid inferences, either.

Therefore, it is only by turning over the E and 7 cards that we can make valid inferences about the rule. And, short of gaining access to all possible cards, the best we can do is falsify the rule. Note that the cards are presented in the same order as I used in explaining the logic. E = P, K = ¬P, 2 = Q, and 7 = ¬Q.

Did you get the right answer? Did you consciously work through the logic or respond to an intuition? Did you make the connection with the explanation of the conditional syllogism that preceded it?

I confess that I did not get the right answer, and I had read a more elaborate explanation of the conditional logic involved. I did not work through the logic, but chose the cards named in the rule. 

The result has been tested in many different circumstances and variations and seems to be general. Humans, in general, don't use reasoning to solve logic problems, unless they have specific training. Even with specific training, people still get it wrong. Indeed, even though I explained the formal logic of the puzzle immediately beforehand, the majority of readers would have ignored this and chosen to turn over the E and 2 cards, because they used their intuition instead of logic to infer the answer.


~Reasons~

In a recent post (Reasoning, Reasons, and Culpability, 20 Jul 2017) I explored some of the consequences of this result. Mercier and Sperber go from Wason into a consideration of unconscious processing of information. They discuss and ultimately reject Kahneman's so-called dual process models of thinking (with two systems, one fast and one slow). There is only one process, Mercier and Sperber argue, and it is unconscious. All of our decisions are made this way. When required, they argue, we produce conscious reasons after the fact (post hoc). The reason we are slow at producing reasons is that they don't exist before we are asked for them (or ask ourselves - which is something Mercier and Sperber don't talk about much). It takes time to make up plausible sounding reasons; we have to go through the process of asking, given what we know about ourselves, what a plausible reason might be. And because of cognitive bias, we settle for the first plausible explanation we come up with. Then, as far as we are concerned, that is the reason.

It's no wonder there was scope for Dr Freud to come along and point out that people's stated motives were very often not the motives that one could deduce from detailed observation of the person (particularly paying attention to moments when the unconscious mind seemed to reveal itself). 

This does not discount the fact that we have two brain regions that process incoming information. It is most apparent in situations that scare us. For example, an unidentified sound will trigger the amygdala to create a cascade of activation across the sympathetic nervous system. Within moments our heart rate is elevated, our breathing shallow and rapid, and our muscles flooding with blood. We are ready for action. The same signal reaches the prefrontal cortex more slowly. The sound is identified in the aural processing area, then fed to the prefrontal cortex which is able to override the excitation of the amygdala.

A classic example is walking beside a road with traffic speeding past. Large, rapidly moving objects ought to frighten us because we evolved to escape from marauding beasts. Not just predators either, since animals like elephants or rhinos can be extremely dangerous. But our prefrontal cortex has established that cars almost always stay on the road and follow predictable trajectories. Much more alertness is required when crossing the road. I suspect that the failure to switch on that alertness after suppressing it might be responsible for many pedestrian accidents. Certainly, where I live, pedestrians commonly step out into the road without looking.

It is not that the amygdala is "emotional" and the prefrontal cortex is "rational". Both parts of the brain are processing sense data, but one is getting it raw and setting off reactions that involve alertness and readiness, while the other is getting it with an overlay of identification and recognition and either signalling to turn up the alertness or to turn it down. And this does not happen in isolation, but is part of a complex system by which we respond to the world. The internal physical sensations associated with these systems, combined with our thoughts, both conscious and unconscious, about the situation are our emotions. We've made thought and emotion into two separate categories and divided up our responses to the world into one or the other, but in fact, the two are always co-existent.

Just because we have these categories, does not mean they are natural or reflect reality. For example, I have written about the fact that ancient Buddhist texts did not have a category like "emotion". They had loads of words for emotions, but lumped all this together with mental activity (Emotions in Buddhism. 04 November 2011). Similarly, ancient Buddhist texts did not see the mind as a theatre of experience or have any analogue of the MIND IS A CONTAINER metaphor (27 July 2012). The ways we think about the mind are not categories imposed on us by nature, but the opposite, categories that we have imposed on experience. 

Emotion is almost entirely missing from Mercier and Sperber's book. While I can follow their argument, and find it compelling in many ways, I think their thesis is flawed for leaving emotion out of the account of reason. In what I consider to be one of my key essays, Facts and Feelings, composed in 2012, I drew on work by Antonio Damasio to make a case for how emotions are involved in decision making. Specifically, emotions encode the value of information over and above how accurate we consider it.

We know this because when the connection between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala is disrupted, by brain damage, for example, it can disrupt the ability to made decisions. In the famous case of Phineas Gage, his brain was damaged by a railway spike being drive through his cheek and out the top of his head. He lived and recovered, but he began to make poor decisions in social situations. In other cases, recounted by Damasio (and others) people with damage to the ventro-medial pre-frontal cortex lose the ability to assess alternatives like where to go for dinner, or what day they would like doctor's appointment on. The specifics of this disruption suggests that we weigh up information and make decisions based on how we feel about the information.

Take also the case of Capgras Syndrome. In this case, the patient will recognise a loved one, but not feel the emotional response that normally goes with such recognition. To account for this discrepancy they confabulate accounts in which the loved one has been replaced by a replica, often involving some sort of conspiracy (a theme which has become all too common in speculative fiction). Emotions are what tell us how important things are to us and, indeed, in what way they are important. We can feel attracted to or repelled by the stimulus; the warm feeling when we see a loved one, the cold one when we see an enemy. We also have expectations and anticipations based on previous experience (fear, anxiety, excitement, and so on).

Mercier and Sperber acknowledge that there is an unconscious inferential process, but never delve into how it might work. But we know from Damasio and others that it involves emotions. Now, it seems that this process is entirely, or mostly, unconscious and that when reasons are required, we construct them as explanations to ourselves and others for something that has already occurred.

Sometimes we talk about making unemotional decisions, or associate rationality with the absence of emotion. But we need to be clear on this: without emotions, we cannot make decisions. Rationality is not possible without emotions to tell us how important things are, where "things" are people, objects, places, etc. 

In their earlier work (See An Argumentative Theory of Reason) of 2011, Mercier and Sperber argued that we use reasoning to win arguments. They noted the poor performance on a test of reasoning like the Wason task and added the prevalence of confirmation bias. They argued that this could be best understood in terms of decision-making in small groups (which is, after all, the natural context for a human being). As an issue comes up, each contributor makes the best case they can, citing all the supporting evidence and arguments. Here, confirmation bias is a feature, not a bug. However, those listening to the proposals are much better at evaluating arguments and do not fall into confirmation bias. Thus, Mercier and Sperber concluded, humans only employ reasoning to decide issues when there is an argument. 

The new book expands on this idea, but takes a much broader view. However, I want to come back and emphasise this point about groups. All too often, philosophers are trapped in solipsism. They try to account for the world as though individuals cannot compare notes, as though everything can and should be understood from the point of view of an isolated individual. So, existing theories of rationality all assume that a person reasons in isolation. But I'm going to put my foot down here and insist that humans never do anything in isolation. Even hermits have a notional relation to their community - they are defined by their refusal of society. We are social primates. Under natural conditions, we do everything together. Of course, for 12,000 years or so, an increasing number of us have been living in unnatural conditions that have warped our sensibilities, but even so, we need to acknowledge the social nature of humanity. All individual psychology is bunk. There is only social psychology. All solipsistic philosophy is bunk. People only reason in groups. The Wason task shows that on our own we don't reason at all, but rely on unconscious inferences. But these unconscious (dare I say instinctual) processes did not evolve for city slickers. They evolved for hunter-gatherers.

It feels to me like we are a transitional period in which old paradigms of thinking about ourselves, about our minds, are falling away to be replaced by emerging, empirically based paradigms that are still taking shape. What words like "thought", "emotion", "consciousness", and "reasoning" mean is in flux. Which means that we live in interesting times. It's possible that a generation from now, our view of mind, at least amongst intellectuals, is going to be very different. 

~~oOo~~



Bibliography

Mercier, Hugo & Sperber, Dan. (2011) 'Why Do Humans Reason. Arguments for an Argumentative Theory.' Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 34: 57 – 111. doi:10.1017/S0140525X10000968. Available from Dan Sperber's website.

Mercier, Hugo & Sperber, Dan. (2017) The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding. Allen Lane.

See also my essay: Reasoning and Beliefs 10 January 2014





11 August 2017

Fixing the Broken Heart Sutra.

In this essay I do several things. I show that Conze bungled the editing of the Section VI of the Heart Sutra (Section VII in my nomenclature) and how to fix the received text. I review research by Huifeng which shows that the original Sanskrit translator also bungled, and go into detail on how to fix his mistakes. I incidentally show that Red Pine is also a bungler. By doing the basic philology that should have been done a century ago, I explain the grammar of this passage of the Heart Sutra and how to better construct it in Sanskrit. I give a revised Sanskrit text that is far more consistent with existing Chinese texts. I once again ponder the dire state of Buddhist philology. 
~o~ 

One of the many linguistic puzzles of the Heart Sutra is the construction nāstitvād that one finds in Conze's Section VI. I have been worrying away at this problem for five years and just now had a breakthrough, but it requires some context. The text in Conze's revised, 1967 edition and 1975 translation of the Heart Sutra tells us: 
Tasmāc Chāriputra aprāptitvād bodhisattvo  prajñāpāramitām āśritya viharaty acittāvaraṇaḥ. Cittāvaraṇa-nāstitvād atrasto viparyāsa-atikrānto nishṭhā-nirvāṇa-prāptaḥ. 
Therefore, O Śāriputra, it is because of his non-attainmentness that a bodhisattva, through having relied on the perfection of wisdom, dwells without thought-coverings. In the absence of thought-coverings he has not been made to tremble, he has overcome what can be upset, and in the end attains to Nirvāṇa (Buddhist Wisdom Books).
Almost everything about this translation is wrong. It is one of the most egregious examples of Buddhist Hybrid English in the entire canon of Buddhist translations. The English is execrable and incomprehensible. "Non-attainmentness" is a rather ugly neologism. And what on earth is a "thought-covering" (and why is it hyphenated)? Nor have other translators ever really got to grip with this passage. Those who purport to translate it from Sanskrit have failed to see a very basic mistake in Conze's Sanskrit (incidentally repeated by Vaidya in his edition). Red Pine simply dismisses the rules of Sanskrit grammar at this point with hand-waving and produces a translation that fits his preconceptions but has nothing to do with the underlying text (See p.137 of his book). 

As with previous essays of this kind, I will make frequent use of the Chinese. In a previous essay, I worked through Huifeng's treatment of the Sanskrit acittāvaraṇaḥ in light of the Chinese text. I accepted that he was right to reinterpret the passage, but disagreed on the definition of the key verb. He wanted 罣 to mean "hang" and I insisted on the more basic meaning of "stick".

The Chinese passage in T2521, which most East Asians take to be the Heart Sutra, reads (though note that the punctuation is modern):
以無所得故,菩提薩埵依 般若波羅蜜多故,心無罣礙;無罣礙故,無有恐怖,遠離顛倒夢想 ,究竟涅槃。
And this means more or less the same. I'll work through the differences as we go.  The first difference is to notice that the Chinese text has no "therefore Śāriputra" here.

Next, Huifeng has shown that aprāptitvād is an incorrect translation of 以無所得故.  In fact, Kumārajīva most often uses these characters to represent anupalambhayogena. And Huifeng makes a very good case for taking this word with the previous section and as ending a sentence. So if we make these corrections we get a working text that looks like this

Tasmācchāriputra śūnyatāyāṃ na rūpaṃ… na prāptir nābhsamayo anupalambhayogena ॥  
Bodhisatvo prajñāpāramitām āśritya viharaty acittāvaraṇaḥ. Cittāvaraṇa-nāstitvād atrasto viparyāsa-atikrānto nishṭhā-nirvāṇa-prāptaḥ. 

Now, bodhisatvo does not just start a new sentence, it starts a next paragraph or section. Focusing now on this new paragraph, since we have eliminated the possibility that 心無罣礙 means acittavaraṇaḥ, it is extremely unlikely that 無罣礙故 can mean acittavaraṇaḥ nāstitvād (and anyway this is a very weird construction). Moreover, there is no verb like viharati "dwell" anywhere in Chinese.

Unfortunately, although he gave an English translation which conveyed the correct reading of the Chinese, Huifeng didn't give a Sanskrit reading (and declined to do so when I pestered him in person). With the help of some colleagues I came up with an alternative Sanskrit reading based on the hints in Huifeng's article:
yo bodhisatvaḥ  prajñāpāramitām āśritya asya cittam na kvacit sajjati ।
The mind of the bodhisatva who relies on perfection of wisdom, does not get stuck anywhere.
The phrase "does not get stuck" could also be "does not get attached"  But how to deal with Cittāvaraṇa-nāstitvād atrasto viparyāsa-atikrānto nishṭhā-nirvāṇa-prāptaḥ? It is at this point that Red Pine simply abandons grammar and simply makes up a translation to suit his purposes. But the fact is that there is nothing very difficult here, except that Conze has once again led us astray.

In his 1948 edition, the last word in the sentence is nishṭhā-nirvāṇaḥ. Let us start here. Nirvāṇa is an adjective and thus properly takes the gender of the noun it describes. Buddhists often use it as a noun, and when they do so it is invariably neuter. The eagle-eyed reader will note that here nirvāṇaḥ has a masculine nominative singular ending. This can mean only one thing (and there is nothing "vague" here, contra Mr Pine)  which is that nishṭhā-nirvāṇa is a bahuvrīhi or adjectival compound. And it is describing a noun in the masculine nominative singular case. In Conze's Sanskrit, there is no such noun in this sentence. However, there is one in the previous sentence, i.e., bodhisatvaḥ (and note that -aḥ followed by p is unchanged, so bodhisatvo is wrong in Conze).

This tells us that Conze has blundered (again). Here we have just one sentence. It also tells us that we don't need prāpta. Prāpta (the passive past participle of prāpṇoti "to attain") was added to provide a verbal derivative because, just as in English, a Sanskrit sentence has to have a verb or a verbal derivative acting as a verb. By dividing one sentence, with one main verb, into two sentences, Conze has created an ungrammatical entity. Ancient scribes added prāptaḥ or in one case the verb prāpṇoti, but it was never needed. It also makes Red Pine's decision to take atikranto as the verb look silly (not to mention that this leaves viparyāsa undeclined, which is also not allowed).

The rules of grammar in any language are not simple. But the person who composed the Sanskrit followed those rules and it is the subsequent editors, translators, and commentators who have been at fault. Conze was an expert in Sanskrit so I cannot imagine why he went off piste in this case. Other experts, some of whom I hold in the highest esteem, have also failed to notice which rules were being applied.

There are, in fact, three bahuvrīhi compounds in a row, all of which describe the bodhisatva:
  1. atrastaḥ “one who is without fear”  
  2. viparyāsa-atikrāntaḥ “one who has overcome delusions”
  3. niṣṭhānirvāṇaḥ “one who has extinction as his end”
 So our working text now reads
yo bodhisatvaḥ  prajñāpāramitām āśritya asya cittam na kvacit sajjati  cittāvaraṇa-nāstitvād so atrasto viparyāsa-atikrānto nishṭhā-nirvāṇaḥ
A quick comparison with the punctuation of the Chinese text T251 tells us that the editors of Taishō were on the same wavelength (though inconsistently; in T250 they side with Conze and break the passage into two sentences!). But we can refine this further. I said above "it is extremely unlikely that 無罣礙故 can mean acittavaraṇaḥ nāstitvād". Based on Huifeng's research the Chinese characters most like mean asaṅgatvād "because of being without attachment". And this gives us
yo bodhisatvaḥ prajñāpāramitām āśritya asya cittam na kvacit sajjati asaṅgatvād so atrasto viparyāsātikrānto nishṭhānirvāṇaḥ |
However, when we look again at the Chinese we notice some further issues with these adjectival compounds. Firstly there are four of them in Chinese, and secondly the two key texts T250 and T2521 are different.
T250: 無有恐怖,離一切顛倒夢想苦惱,究竟涅槃。
T251: 無有恐怖,遠離顛倒夢想,究竟涅槃。
Well, take this a step at a time, and it is well worth taking our time because the first part of this provides us with a nice little insight. From the Sanskrit, we are expecting an adjective which means "he is not afraid". What we get is "non- 無, existent 有, terror 恐怖". Typically, we read this as "being without fear" to match the Sanskrit. But let's look again at the passage with the previous word added and without the modern punctuation.
無罣礙故無有恐怖遠離顛倒夢想
This is what the Sanskrit translator saw in the 7th Century. He had to figure out where the breaks come. We can see where the modern editors have put the breaks, but what if the translator became a little confused at this point and bracketed out the wrong characters and thought he saw something like this:
無 [罣礙故無有] 恐怖 遠離 顛倒 夢想
Now, this is an unlikely reading, but I'll tell you why I am highlighting it.  If we take the bracketed characters 罣礙故無有 the phrase 無 [罣礙故無有] 恐怖 says something like "not—because of the non-existence of mental obstructions—afraid". So is 無有 here the source of nāstitvād? There is no other explanation I can think of and no other explanation has ever been offered, to the best of my knowledge. Although the Chinese text is mangled in the process, we know it is not the first time the translator has mangled the text in the process of translating it into Sanskrit. But we also know that the translator does understand that 無 corresponds to the Sanskrit prefix a- or to the negative particle na. Which is to say that he knows better than to use nāstitvād when a- or na would do, and thus nāstitvād is in need of some explanation. If there is another explanation, I'd love to hear it.

Then we have some pairs of characters:
  • 恐怖 "afraid" 
  • 遠離 "goes beyond" = Sanskrit atikranto
  • 顛倒 "delusion = Skt viparyāsa
  • 夢想 "dream thoughts" i.e., illusions = Skt māyā.

In Chinese, the order of 遠離, "goes beyond"  and 顛倒, "delusion", suggests an active verb. And on this basis it would be possible to quibble with the construction of the Sanskrit. But I propose to leave the basic structure intact here. The translator has also mushed 顛倒 and 夢想 together into the familiar Sanskrit word viparyāsa, when he might have included the concept of māyā. Adding māyā here would be interesting in light of my observation about the relation of śūnyatā and māyā (soon to be published, but preliminary notes blogged) Now we want viparyāsātikrānta to be a descriptive compound and we would read this as "the bodhisatva has overcome delusions." I think we could follow the Chinese more precisely by having viparyāsmāyātikrānta. 

Note that T250 and T251 differ slightly here (added spaces for comparative purposes)
T251: 遠離        顛倒夢想,
T250:     離一切顛倒夢想苦惱.
The extra bits are 一切, meaning "all" (literally, "a single cut"), and 苦惱, meaning "misery and trouble", where 苦 is the character most often used for Sanskrit duḥkha. In T250, 離 means "depart, go away"; while in T251, 遠離 has the same meaning, but with greater emphasis. A similar distinction is found in Sanskrit between atikranta and saṃatikranta, for example.

The final piece of the puzzle, then, is how to translate 究竟涅槃. As I have explained in another previous essay, niṣṭhānirvāṇa was a poor choice. Kumārajīva uses these characters for a nirvāṇaparyavasānam. In our text it is being used an adjective of bodhisatvaḥ and must be given in the masculine nominative singular: nirvāṇaparyavasānaḥ. This gives us a final text:
yo bodhisatvaḥ prajñāpāramitām āśritya asya cittam na kvacit sajjati asaṅgatvād so atrasto viparyāsamāyātikrānto nirvāṇaparyavasānaḥ |
Of course, there are always difference ways to translate passages from one language to another. One only has to look at English translations of the Heart Sutra which continue to multiply and diverge from each other. With the Heart Sutra each exegete appears to be trying to put their own unique stamp on the text rather than all of us working towards a common understanding and a single standard translation. In other words, in the usual Buddhist critique, translating the Heart Sutra is more often an occasion for egoism than for transcending self. Rather ironic, really.  

At the very least, this essay has shown, again, how poorly the Buddhist community has been served at times by philologists and traditional exegesis. Here is a short text, barely 250 words or characters, that is supposed to be chanted daily by millions of Buddhists, and we still don't have an accurate text to chant.

I have spent a considerable part of the last five years forensically examining this text in Sanskrit and Chinese, with help from key allies, and have been posting my many notes here as I go in the form of more than 30 essays. My third peer-reviewed publication on the text will be out in November 2017. Not everyone is going to be able to follow the argument in this essay, but I hope some of you will at least try. Experience shows that traditionalists will resist any call to change the Heart Sutra and will probably deny that anything is wrong with the text. But people need to know that the familiar Heart Sutra is deeply flawed and in need of surgery. And that the so-called authorities on the text have never noticed this stark fact.

I confess that I am thoroughly vexed by all this bungling. I am far from the best person to be trying to sort this mess out, but the best people have come and gone and the mess remains. Some of them have made huge contributions to the field and clearly had bigger fish to fry, but the Heart Sutra is not exactly inconsequential in Buddhism. That is has been left in this state by philologists does my head in. If I can understand it, why did they not? I'm not special. Something as simple as noticing that a neuter noun is declined as masculine and therefore must be an adjective is just basic Sanskrit. You learn this in the first month of the first year of studying the language. How does anyone miss this, let alone everyone? I also missed it for years. I have studied this passage before and thought about how to translate it. I suppose I'm now something of an expert on the text (if not an authority) but if you look around the internet there are dozens of people with strong opinions on how to understand the text. It's just that none of them seems to actually read the text in Sanskrit and think about how to parse the sentences. 

In particular, in my circles, Conze and Red Pine are treated as reliable guides, but are, in fact, often, or even mostly, unreliable. Neither of them deserves their reputation for scholarship. Both are bunglers and have set back understanding of this text amongst Buddhists by decades. Kazuaki Tanahashi is not much better. Though his book is an improvement on Pine's, it is full of careless errors or just plain ignorance of Sanskrit. The dozens of commentaries are just rote recitations of sectarian gibberish. Mu Soeng frankly seems like a lunatic and his opinions on Sanskrit are laugh-out-loud wrong. The Dalai Lama is just going through the motions, reciting some ancient commentary by rote. D T Suzuki is busy doing his Mr Spock impression. It's all so depressing. How does the most popular text in Buddhism come to be treated so shabbily? It is gold. But not for the reasons that any famous Buddhists think it is. 

People often ask me what book they should read on the Heart Sutra. I get blank looks when I say that, in my opinion, it is better not to read any of the books currently available. They are full of inaccurate information. I mean it. The more you read about the Heart Sutra, the more wrong information you are assimilating that will only have to be unlearned in the end. I hope to remedy that situation soon by publishing a small book which gives an overview of recent research on the text (including mine, of course, but a few other people like Huifeng and Jan Nattier). In the meantime beware of fake Heart Sutra news, I guess. You're better off setting the sūtra  to one side and talking to someone who has some real depth of experience in meditation. Come back to it when you have experienced cessation for yourself. That would help head-off the most egregious wrong views. 

~~oOo~~


Conze, Edward (1948) Text, Sources, and Bibliography of the Prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, April 80(1-2): 33-51.

Conze, Edward. (1967) The Prajñāpāramitā-Hṛdaya Sūtra in Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies: Selected Essays, Bruno Cassirer, pp. 147-167. Modified version of Conze (1948).

Conze, Edward. (1975) Buddhist Wisdom Books: The Diamond Sutra and the Heart Sutra. George Allen & Unwin. First Ed. 1957.

Huifeng. (2014). ‘Apocryphal Treatment for Conze’s Heart Problems: “Non-attainment”, “Apprehension”, and “Mental Hanging” in the Prajñāpāramitā.’ Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies. 6: 72-105. http://www.ocbs.org/ojs/index.php/jocbs/article/view/75
Related Posts with Thumbnails